Craica2

In the shantytown of Craica where Caritas has built a community center the challenges are proving to be far more difficult. Craica is a strip of land 30-foot wide teeming with makeshift huts of scrap wood, metals, plastic and mud between a polluted creek floating bloated animal carcasses and a raised railroad tracks. The shantytown began forming during post communist transition as factories began shutting down and stereotyped Gypsies became quickly caught in the rotation of being first fired and last hired. Unable to keep their apartments they loaded up all that they had, set it up here and put walls up around it. Today about 700 Roma live here,

   The St. Francis Community Center, or what the Gypsies of Craica call �casutza� (dollhouse), now beginning its second anniversary in the community, offers a necessary kindergarten and an after school program where the children of Craica can make their studies. It also offers showers and a laundry facility for children and adult as well as a necessary counseling program informing the people of their right and assisting them with legal issues, health and educational needs.

   �No one else comes here. No one helps us, only Casutza,� says Tiberiu Matisan, a street cleaner earning $130 a month, less than half the nations average salary. �They helped me replace my ID card and we take showers there. We have no water. We have one faucet shared by everyone and when it rains it becomes contaminated. We have to go to the blocks and buy water,� he laments in the midst of five sullen children

   Unfortunately the program is already overstretched forcing them to turn away people like Ecaterina Gospar who�s husband was imprisoned for stealing recyclable iron to feed the family leaving her with four young children. The windows of her one room shack are sealed with plastic. She is without electricity or a stove and as winter sets in she isn�t sure how she will keep her and the children from freezing.

Family at Craica - everything to fire

A census carried out by the social workers of St. Frances found 70% of the adults to be unemployed, surviving on welfare benefits or scavenging iron out of the local dump for recycling. They found one half of the adult population illiterate with almost a quarter of the young people following that same path by not attending any schooling. Eleven percent of those in school have already dropped out while a whopping 64 % of pre-school age children are not attending valuable kindergarten promising a continued marginalized existence for yet another generation.

�The people of Craica had apartments and steady jobs till about ten years ago,� explains the Community Center�s social worker Ana Busecan. �Our concern now is that the children are learning this way of living and you can see the teenagers already starting to follow the same path� Like you said, after they leave the classrooms here they return to their old ways, but if they went there and behaved there like here saying, �please� and thank you � they would die. I mean, not like that, but they couldn�t survive.�

Some of the young people at Craica have spent time in the underground world as street children in cities like Bucharest and picked up many of their bad habits like sniffing glue and rummaging through garbage for food. �For some of the street children life on the streets is better than it is at home,� says Cornel Bindea, social worker from Bucharest Caritas who has worked with street children.

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